I didn’t read much new SF and fantasy this year. I spent a lot of time being anxious for reasons outside the scope of this essay (cough politics cough), and in times like that, I tend to revisit old beloved books, so I spent some time returning to works by Connie Willis, and Terry Pratchett, and Joe Abercrombie (I know, Lord Grimdark might seem an odd choice for comfort reading, ...Read More
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I Am Providence, Nick Mamatas (Night Shade 978-1597808354, $15.99, 256pp, tp) August 2016.
In recent years Nick Mamatas has moved away from the horror, SF, and experimental fiction fields in order to write more crime fiction, including the 2013 novel Love Is the Law. I was afraid, if this trend continued, that I wouldn’t be able to justify reviewing his books for Locus anymore. That time may yet come, but
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The Spider’s War, Daniel Abraham (Orbit 978-0316204057, $16.00, 526pp, tp) March 2016.
Daniel Abraham has gotten a lot of attention lately, but mostly as half of the writing team James S.A. Corey (with Ty Franck). Their popular Expanse space opera is one of my favorite SF series, but it does tend to overshadow the equally good and quite different fantasy saga Abraham writes solo, the Dagger and the Coin.
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I said nice things in these pages a while back about Darin Bradley’s debut novel Noise, an ambitious book about a slow-motion apocalypse, with economic collapse triggering a breakdown of order in the United States, and young people trying to forge a new and brutal system of morality and pragmatism that would allow them to survive the aftermath. I mention that novel because his follow-up Chimpanzee is, while not
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Alan DeNiro’s second collection Tyrannia and Other Renditions is even stranger and more ambitious than his 2006 debut Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. DeNiro prefers hard questions to easy answers, and his stories eschew neat resolutions and tidy explanations, but while he makes liberal use of surrealism and absurdity, there’s usually a rigorous structure underneath, whether it’s carefully thought-out thematic underpinnings or complex SFnal worldbuilding. DeNiro
...Read MoreYou’ve got to love a literary novel that starts with the protagonist shooting Hitler in the heart in 1930.
Kate Atkinson is best known for her marvelous literary mysteries, notably the Jackson Brodie novels. While I eagerly await the next installment in that series, I was pleased to pick up her new standalone, Life After Life, and even more delighted when I realized it has a speculative premise. Apart
...Read MoreDaniel Polansky’s debut novel Low Town is hardboiled fantasy, taking the structure of a noir crime novel and setting it not in the mean streets of our world but in a fantasy universe. The closest analogue that comes to mind is Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie LaCrosse series, which transforms the wisecracking private investigator into a freelance ‘‘sword jockey’’ in a magical world. Polansky’s novel is darker, however, and centers on a
...Read MoreSensation by Nick Mamatas is a political satire and a meditation on the nature of reality reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, exploring the secret history of an age-old war between a hive-mind of hyperintelligent spiders and their implacable mindless enemies, a species of parasitic wasp. (The entirety of human history is either driven by that war or incidental to it.)
The main character – only occasionally ‘‘heroine’’ – is Julia
...Read MoreMira Grant is a pseudonym for writer Seanan McGuire, who made a splash with last year’s debut novel Rosemary and Rue, about a half-Fae detective. As Grant she writes about zombies instead of fairies, but calling her a horror writer wouldn’t be particularly accurate. Feed is more of a sociological science fiction novel, intelligently extrapolating the future trajectory of a world where the dead begin to rise and attempt
...Read MoreThe Wolf Age is the third book in James Enge’s inventive and delightful sword and sorcery series following the adventures and misfortunes of larger-than-life hero Morlock Ambrosius. The novel stands alone quite well, though – in fact, I read this volume first, and promptly tracked down the earlier titles, Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way, because I enjoyed this one so much.
It takes a certain amount of
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